Upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for only $39.99!

[Bif]

It seems insane to me, too - but they've put heavy emphasis on promoting Metro development, they've outright locked the free version of Visual Studio into only building Metro apps, and simply, it's the logical extension of what they're trying to do.

The old article you linked looks quite wrong, or maybe MS changed their mind after. You can get Express 2012 for "desktop" right now:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-for-windows-desktop

I was quite looking forward to upgrading to it as I read about it last month. It supports 64-bit EXEs and it sounds like they now may include code coverage tools. Pretty damn good product for free, not sure there is even a need for the paid versions anymore. You had me freaked out there for a while reading that article.

I don't disagree with you all that much about Win8 though. It may be fine now but I would think indeed they will want to lock everything down to Metro and jettison the legacy stuff at some point. Otherwise what is the point of all this. Just try to imagine where it will be 10 years from now. I don't really blame MS for trying this though as I can't imagine how relevant Windows will be if it has to compete with the ease of use and installation of apps and virus issues it's at right now compared to the brain dead experience people are coming to appreciate on mobile/tablet devices.

I do actually think an App store is a great thing though that solves a lot of problems. However there's no way in hell as a developer I will pay $49 for the privilege of providing a free app for it though. If I was ever forced to provide an app that I spent thousands of hours of my time to work on for the benefit of YOUR OS ... I'll be over to the Linux camp. That's just a bit of a slap in the face even if it's not much money.

[Bif]

Wait, are they seriously charging even for getting free software added to the Windows Store? Who would bother with that?

Actually I think I just read the $49 thing a page or two ago in this thread. I've learned to not trust anything I see typed on forums or social media, I should have verified that first. But it checks out. The relevant part is near the end of this link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/br230836

"Windows 8 represents the single biggest platform opportunity available, and business terms of the Windows Store represent a developer-first point of view. The registration fee for individuals is $49 USD, with a $99 USD fee for companies. The revenue share is 70%, but when an app achieves $25,000 USD in revenue—aggregated across all sales in every market—that changes to 80% revenue share for the rest of the lifetime of the app."

So I guess you are in it for at least $49 unless there is some other accommodation for free apps.

Something I find interesting is all this app store stuff seems so bent towards making money. Understandable for Microsoft. I guess I'm more of a free software kind of guy where I like to write and use free software. I'm not sure Microsoft ever even thinks or cares about that, but they could end up irking a lot of the free software types if eventually you HAVE to go through an app store and HAVE to pay to get stuff on it. If I wanted to make money, I wouldn't actually have any problem with their fee structure, but the free software people are in a completely different head space where they won't want to pay $1 for the right to do anything, it's a barrier thing.

[Bif]

That actually sounds like a breeze. The only thing that makes it sound slightly annoying is that going from SP2 doesn't automatically download SP3. It always used to, but I never used media centre & it could have broken in the mean time. Big deal that it downloaded 119 patches automatically, that counts as it just works.

My wife's aging laptop ran XP until it died about a year ago. Re-installing XP and all the updates seemed to take about 2 or 3 days each time it needed a re-install. Between the speed of her laptop and then having to wait until morning to see if the updates were done before another reboot, etc., is why it took so long. It was utterly painful having to go through all that. This is one area where things could have used some serious streamlining on the installer side, at that point it would be better just downloading some latest distribution of XP with all the fixes in places and install it all at once.

For our computers I always just run the version of Windows it came with and never upgrade it. No way in hell I'd ever fork out $$$ for a new version of Windows. Especially when traditionally you can get a new computer with OEM Windows for not much more than the cost of Windows purchased separately. Honestly I don't really care much either, I'm fine with running Vista or whatever until the computer craps itself.

I played around with Ubuntu in that time thinking to move her on to that as I was so sick of the install issue. I have to say it seemed way less painful getting a distribution up and running. At least it's always up to date since you can just freely download the latest. However, it did turn out her laptop wasn't 100% compatible so it was a no go (I was trying Ubuntu on some other computer). That's the main thing that has kept me off Linux, compatibility issues, I seem to have weird computers that aren't well supported. Otherwise I'd probably be all over Linux throughout the house, even just for more piece of mind on the malware side.

I don't know why but she seemed to be good at getting viruses, that's why all the re-installs. Damned evil crafting sites or something. Funny enough that's why I got back into Amiga, I was wondering if I could hook her Amiga 2000 back up to see if she could connect to the internet on that ... pretty sure she couldn't cock that up with a virus.

[Bif]

I am quite happy to hear Windows tablets are failing miserably. I normally wouldn't care too much about this as the market will sort itself out and I don't have to buy one, but in this case I can personally feel MS throwing their weight around with money headed towards developers in a way that affects me personally. And then there is all the relentless sickening advertising.

For example, my local TV station also has a site for streaming all the content. They've had an iOS app for years so you can watch on your iOS device. No surprise there given the market share. I always hoped for an Android version as I'm an Android user. The day Windows tablets rolled out, lo and behold there was a Windows tablet version of the app (that all 0% of their users could enjoy), and there's lots of advertising on the site about it. I'm sure MS sent a heap of money to the TV station - and I don't even have a big problem with that, but I have a feeling that probably came with the catch of telling the TV station they would be less than pleased if the leading market share device, Android, had an app made available.

Then when I do watch the shows, I'm treated to Sherlock Holmes staring at a "Windows Start" or "Skype" screen for 10 seconds with a dumbfounded look. It's so idiotic it makes the shows ridiculous. And then all the streamed commercials are about Microsoft. For me, it just makes me not be able to stand it all, I'd never buy an MS product that spends so much time annoying me.